Pavan Kulkarni
Mass detentions, motorcycle rallies, protest marches and demonstrations, pickets in industrial areas forcing factories to shut down, and the ubiquitous red flags fluttering over these actions marked the All-India General Strike on February 12 in Karnataka.
Over 600,000 workers downed tools. Almost 100,000 workers, farmers, and activists participated in street actions across its 31 districts. Production had largely come to a halt in most major industrial areas of the state capital, Bangalore, and the neighboring Ramanagar districts.
”Despite our strike notice, some factories were still running in Nelamangala”, an industrial area in the west of Bangalore along National Highway 48, said Anjum, secretary of the Bangalore rural district committee of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU).
Local Workers Confront Global Capital
Among them was the Smart Power factory of the Switzerland-based ABB group. A manufacturing unit of German Frenzeli, which produces expansion joints, high-temperature sealing, and other parts used in industrial machinery, was also functioning.
The US-based Pepsi was quietly operating in partial capacity, trying to avoid the attention of the thousand-odd, red T-shirt-clad workers and union leaders rallying on motorcycles through the industrial areas to enforce the strike. However, workers have their own local intelligence network. It is difficult to evade their notice on a day such as this.
”We halted our motorcycles before each one of those factories,” swarmed their gates, blocked their entrances and exits, and forced the management to turn off the power, shut down, and relieve all workers.
Swiss manufacturer ABB forced to relieve workers. Photo: CITU
However, most factories in these industrial areas had voluntarily shuttered for the day, including his own employer, DENSO Kirloskar, a joint venture between Japanese DENSO Corporation and Indian Kirloskar Group, which manufactures air-conditioning and engine cooling system components for automotives.
The industrial area unit of the Joint Committee of Trade Unions (JCTU), a coalition of ten major trade union federations in the country, had served strike notices to the factories in Nelamangala in advance.
”Some small workshops in the interior may still have operated, escaping our attention, but most of the production was brought to a halt in this industrial area,” said Anjum.
Triumphantly marching to revolutionary slogans after the industrial shutdown, waving hundreds of red flags, about 1,500 gathered before the Taluk Kacheri, a sub-district level administrative office of the government.
Shuttering their shops down in solidarity, local traders, jewellers, tailors, and hawkers all joined the industrial workers for a demonstration. From there, they went marching on foot through all the main roads of Nelamangala, past the police station, and back to the Kacheri, where they held a public meeting.
Non-unionized Workers on Strike
The mobilization of non-unionized workers in industrial areas through pickets, rallies, and marches is crucial for a successful strike in the context of globalization, which has disarticulated large factories, scattering workers on the production line of a product around the world, undermining their capacity to unionize.
Such street actions were prohibited by the police in the Bommasandra Industrial Area in the city’s southeast, where industry owners organized pressure on authorities, said CITU’s Karnataka State vice president, B. N. Manjunath.
However, the unionized workforce (about 30% of the workers here) downed tools and gathered for a 1000-people strong demonstration outside the industrial area at the main roundabout, before rallying about 5 km on National Highway-44 for a public meeting in Chandapura.
In the neighboring Jigani and Attibele, where unionists were able to lead rallies into the industrial areas and mobilize the non-unionized workforce, about 75% of production was halted for the day, following confrontations at many factory gates. About 2,000 workers from Jigani then gathered at the APC circle, blocking a critical node, linking this industrial area to the Bommasandra–Attibele corridor.
Outside Bangalore’s city limits in the rural district to its east, Hoskote was almost entirely shut down. The town is a bottleneck connecting the city to the industrial belt on the highway to Kolar. The Narasapura industrial area is among the most prominent in this belt. A large section of its workers reside in Hoskote town.
Strategic Pickets
“Other workers heading to Narasapura from Bangalore city must also enter Hoskote before connecting to the national highway en route. At this chokepoint, we set up a picket at four in the morning,” said Ananda Kumar, CITU’s working president for the Hoskote sub-district.
“We intercepted many company buses, including those ferrying workers to the iPhone manufacturing plant,” acquired from the Taiwanese company Wistron by the Indian manufacturing giant Tata in late 2023. The company bus of Japanese automotive company Honda was also stopped en route to its plant in Narasapura.
“We appealed to the workers in these buses to join their fellow workers in the strike. All permanent employees got off in solidarity. But contractual workers were too afraid of losing their jobs. So, some large companies like Tata and Honda were able to partially operate on the labour of contractual workers. But overall, at least 80% of the factories in this industrial belt were shut.”
Most of them had already announced closure for the day after being served the strike notice. Among them was the bus manufacturing plant of the Swedish multinational, Volvo, where Kumar is employed as the final inspector on the production line. He also heads its workers’ union. “We manufacture three buses a day. Closing for one day means a five crore loss for the company,” he calculated.
Most shops and commercial enterprises in Hoskote town were also shut in solidarity. Later that morning, employees of the local Gram Panchayat (village council), Dalit rights activists, and members of women’s rights.
Hoskote town shut down as it’s workers and residents march on a torchlight rally. Photo: CITU
”We started from the Taluk Kacheri, marched through all the main roads of the town, before returning to the Kacheri for a public meeting,” following which they delivered a memorandum to Hoskote’s Assistant Commissioner, Ananda said.
Karnataka’s Largest Amusement Blockaded
To the south of Bangalore city, in the industrial area of Harohalli, and the connected Bidadi industrial area in the Ramanagara district, the strike was almost 100%, said the district’s JCTU coordinator and CITU’s Karnataka state secretary, Raghavendra.
Amid a show of force by union mobilizations ahead of the strike, factories, including the Japanese Toyota’s mother plant in India, had agreed not to operate on the day of the general strike upon receiving JCTU’s notice.
Striking workers from the two industrial areas assembled in Bidadi outside Karnataka’s largest amusement park, Wonderla, on the highway from Bangalore to the historic city of Mysore. Wonderla, which is also India’s largest chain of amusement parks, has “transferred its workers who unionized in Bidadi to different states. Under the cover of transfers, they have even dismissed many. Its management has also fronted a fake union, with which it has orchestrated negotiations to undermine us. So today was the day to confront them,” he added.
In defiance of the strike notice, Wonderla had opened the amusement park on the day. However, none could go in. About 3,000 striking workers from Bidadi and Harohalli occupied the road outside its entrance in a protest demonstration, forcing it to “close down for half a day”.
Blockade outside the largest amusement park. Photo: CITU
From there, on about 1,500 motorcycles, we went on a rally of about 6 km to a ground in Bidadi for a public meeting.” On the way, farmers resisting the government’s forced land acquisition in the Byramangala village also joined the workers in the rally.
Industrial Actions Also Reported From Smaller Towns
Further along the highway, workers also withheld labour in several industrial units in the city of Mysore. Strikes were also reported from other cities and towns of Karnataka, including Tumkur, Belagavi, Kalaburagi, and Raichur, where over a thousand workers of the state-owned Hutti Gold Mines blockaded the road.
Unions under CITU alone stopped production in 159 factories, most of them in and around Bangalore, said its state president, Meenakshi Sundaram. The JCTU includes ten unions, with other left formations like the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) and All India Central Council of Trade Unions (AICCTU) also leading several actions.
Automotive and auto parts manufacturing, the engineering industry, electronics, and pharmaceuticals were the sectors most affected by the strike, added Sundaram. Banking was also partially disrupted, with the participation of its unions in the strike. Mid-day meal scheme workers also took part.
Manufacturing Workers on the Forefront
But manufacturing workers, he explained, were the core of the general strike in Karnataka, downing tools in the largest numbers, because they are the most immediately affected by the Labour Codes, whose withdrawal is among the central demands of the unions.
Around 87% of the registered factories in Karnataka employ less than 300 workers, the threshold below which the Labour Codes allow employers to retrench workers without needing government approval. The previous cut-off was at 100 workers.
It wasn’t that the Karnataka State governments had been automatically inclined to deny approval for retrenchments by employers hiring over 100. But the requirement of government approval opened the doors for unions to contest it, both in labour courts and in the public arena, where they could bring political consequences to bear, both on the ruling and the opposition parties.
By raising this threshold to 300 workers, the vast majority of Karnataka’s working class will be denied the possibility of contesting their retrenchments in this field.
Labour Laws Diluted
This is not the only threat posed to the working class by these four Labour Codes that have swallowed down 29 labour laws, diluting the protections they accorded. “They even altered the definition of working hours to exclude scheduled rest hours like lunch breaks,” said Sundaram. This automatically increases the working hours in a country that already ranks among the longest in the world.
Reducing the obligations on the employers to ensure workplace safety, the new codes provide them more wiggle room to get away without compensating in case of a workplace accident by pinning the blame on the injured worker’s own negligence.
The definition of “worker” itself is muddled by these codes, Sundaram added further. Anyone with the slightest supervisory power at work, earning a monthly wage of over Rs 18,000 – which is well below a living wage – “is not considered a ‘worker’ in these codes.” This effectively takes away their access to many industrial dispute mechanisms.
“They have instead been categorized as ‘employees’. But the definition of ’employee’ is left broad and ambiguous,” making it easier for the employers to evade legal liabilities and further contractualize work of a permanent nature.
Easing Business by Bending Labour Rights
While thus promoting the “ease of doing business” by offering “labour flexibility” to the employers, the codes simultaneously constrict trade union functioning. It further limits the number of union office bearers coming from the ranks of professional cadre, who are not necessarily employed in the particular factory or sector, but are skilled and experienced in strategizing and leading negotiations.
While deregulating work conditions, the codes regulate how a union can raise money and impose restrictions on how the funds can be spent. Simply securing recognition for a union is itself enormously more challenging under the new labour codes.
These codes had been rammed through the parliament over five years ago in September 2020 by the far-right BJP ruling in the center. Opposition parties, including the largest of them, the Indian National Congress (INC), had condemned the move as “anti-worker”.
Amid mass opposition by trade unions, which, in multiple general strikes since, mobilized hundreds of millions of workers, the central government did not notify the codes until November 2025, when they took effect.
“The government has snatched away all the rights that workers had in their hands. The protections previously granted to workers have been taken away, and new avenues for their exploitation have been opened,” senior INC MP Priyanka Gandhi said on the codes’ notification.
“Anti-Labour, Anti-Worker, Pro-Cronies”
INC president and leader of opposition in the parliament’s upper house, Mallikarjun Kharge, condemned the central government as “anti-labour, anti-worker, pro-cronies”. Along with former INC chiefs, Rahul Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi, Kharge joined the left MPs in the multi-party protest against the notification of these codes at an entrance to the parliament in the national capital, New Delhi, in December 2025.
A month later, however, in his home state of Karnataka, down south, where the INC is the ruling party, the state government published the draft for Industrial Relations (Karnataka) Rules, 2026, to implement the labour codes, ahead even of many BJP-ruled state governments.
“The Karnataka government,” Sundaram pointed out, “had an opportunity to protect the state’s working class,” from these labour codes which Kharge had eloquently described on the parliament floor as a cover for a multi-pronged attack on the working class by the BJP.
In the neighboring state of Kerala, ruled by the Left Democratic Front (LDF) led by the Communist Party of India – Marxist (CPIM) with which the CITU is affiliated, the state government has refused to implement the labour codes. It has instead called on the central government to withdraw them.
Even if the INC’s Karnataka government did not want to play hardball with the central government, it could, at the very least, “have made amendments to the central codes to ensure that the majority of Karnataka’s working class is not stripped of their labour rights,” insists Sundaram.
“Labour-industry relations fall in the concurrent list of the Constitution. This gives the state government the power to make such amendments to the codes notified by the central government. And they did use this power to amend, but not protect workers. They have instead used it to further intensify the central labour codes’ attack on trade unions.”
For example, the central labour codes, which raise the threshold of minimum membership required for a union’s recognition, nevertheless retain secret ballot voting by workers as the means of determining whether the union represents a sufficient workforce in a factory or sector. The draft rules published by the Karnataka state government have “worsened this by replacing secret ballots with verification by government officials.”
Two Faces of the Leading Opposition Party
In its defense, the state government maintains that the rules it has published are only a draft, and unions can provide input before they are finally legislated later this year. Nevertheless, Sundaram argues, “this draft exposes the intention of the state government.”
Opposing the Labour Codes as an anti-worker policy of the BJP at the center, where the INC wields no power, while pleasing the corporates with an even more aggressive version of it in a state where it rules, is a two-faced nature of the party it does not want exposed, he said.
This, he argued, is the reason the Karnataka state’s police refused permission for the central demonstration on the day of the general strike in front of Bangalore’s Town Hall, a city center under the gaze of the cameras of the large corporate media houses, which mostly ignored the actions in industrial areas.
Mass Detentions
The JCTU refused to budge. On the morning of the general strike, when workers were setting up pickets in the industrial areas, the state police were setting up pickets of their own in front of Town Hall.
Well before the striking workers were set to arrive at the location for a demonstration scheduled at 11 am, “the police were already there in thousands,” with barricades and parked buses for detentions, recalled Sundaram.
Waving red flags and carrying banners, the first rally arrived, sloganeering, with trade unionists and farmer leaders on the front, marching straight into the picket of the police, who started grabbing the protesters.
CITU Karnataka state secretary, Varalakshmi, locked arms with other women leaders and fell back on the road to hold ground and resist arrests. Prying them apart, scores of policewomen hauled them onto buses.
CITU Karnataka State secretary being forcefully arrested. Photo: CITU
Older men and women were also lifted off the ground from their wrists and feet, even as they complained of their damaged knees. Among the Khaki-clad police were also grotesquely large bouncer-like men in blue safari suits with no visible badges revealing their names, unnecessarily manhandling and shoving grey-haired veteran leaders like Sundaram, even as they were courting arrests.
Nevertheless, the protesters continued to arrive in droves, in rally after rally, including one by the Karnataka State IT/ITeS Employees Union (KITU). Relatively new in a largely non-unionized sector, their numbers are not yet large enough to close down IT companies for the strike.
Nonetheless, the union has won many legal battles against several corporate giants of the sector headquartered in the city, successfully reinstating hundreds of terminated employees. It mustered a roughly 200-people-strong rally of software engineers, data analysts, etc, on leave to join this protest.
KITU General Secretary, Suhas Adiga, being forcefully arrested. Photo: CITU
Marching into the police lines with the chants of Inquilab Zindabab, they fiercely resisted arrests, raising slogans of “workers’ unity” against “greedy capitalists”, calling out Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the state’s Chief Minister Siddaramaiah as their agents, while being roughened up and hurled into buses. The youngest detained in this roundup was Nilda Kranti, a six-month-old infant, clutching onto her young mother, who followed her protesting husband into detention.
6 months old infant detained. Photo: CITU
Around this time, Kharge was declaring solidarity with the general strike, with the statement: “From the streets to Parliament, our struggle will continue.”
“Today, millions of workers and farmers across the country are on the streets, raising their voice for their rights,” Rahul Gandhi, leader of the opposition in the parliament’s lower house and former chief of the INC, said in a social media post. “I stand firmly … with their struggle.”
But, down south from the national capital in the state of Karnataka, where his party rules, the police were running out of buses to detain protesters who continued to arrive in rallies at the square in front of the Town Hall. Ordering passengers out of the buses they stopped in traffic, the police diverted more public transport to the Town Hall to continue detaining protesters.
“If the workers and farmers cross the boundary of peaceful protests…”
Most of the detainees, including all the union leaders, were driven to the Police Grounds in Adugodi, where they continued protests under police custody.
“In our long history of protests, we have never turned to violence, never set fire to buses,” Varalakshmi said in her address to this protest. Nevertheless, “the police denied us permission to even make one public announcement of the strike from a speaker on a moving auto-rickshaw.”
This, she went on to argue, shows that the state does not simply insist that the agitations remain peaceful and in compliance with the law and order, but goes on to demand capitulation from “the labouring classes, accepting that they are slaves, with no right to protest.”
“But, we warn you, if we workers and farmers are forced to cross the boundary of peaceful protests, your bullets and batons and prisons will fall short,” she declared, addressing the police, drawing cheers from detained protesters appreciating the arithmetic.
Courtesy: Peoples Dispatch
Over 600,000 workers downed tools. Almost 100,000 workers, farmers, and activists participated in street actions across its 31 districts. Production had largely come to a halt in most major industrial areas of the state capital, Bangalore, and the neighboring Ramanagar districts.
”Despite our strike notice, some factories were still running in Nelamangala”, an industrial area in the west of Bangalore along National Highway 48, said Anjum, secretary of the Bangalore rural district committee of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU).
Local Workers Confront Global Capital
Among them was the Smart Power factory of the Switzerland-based ABB group. A manufacturing unit of German Frenzeli, which produces expansion joints, high-temperature sealing, and other parts used in industrial machinery, was also functioning.
The US-based Pepsi was quietly operating in partial capacity, trying to avoid the attention of the thousand-odd, red T-shirt-clad workers and union leaders rallying on motorcycles through the industrial areas to enforce the strike. However, workers have their own local intelligence network. It is difficult to evade their notice on a day such as this.
”We halted our motorcycles before each one of those factories,” swarmed their gates, blocked their entrances and exits, and forced the management to turn off the power, shut down, and relieve all workers.
Swiss manufacturer ABB forced to relieve workers. Photo: CITUHowever, most factories in these industrial areas had voluntarily shuttered for the day, including his own employer, DENSO Kirloskar, a joint venture between Japanese DENSO Corporation and Indian Kirloskar Group, which manufactures air-conditioning and engine cooling system components for automotives.
The industrial area unit of the Joint Committee of Trade Unions (JCTU), a coalition of ten major trade union federations in the country, had served strike notices to the factories in Nelamangala in advance.
”Some small workshops in the interior may still have operated, escaping our attention, but most of the production was brought to a halt in this industrial area,” said Anjum.
Triumphantly marching to revolutionary slogans after the industrial shutdown, waving hundreds of red flags, about 1,500 gathered before the Taluk Kacheri, a sub-district level administrative office of the government.
Shuttering their shops down in solidarity, local traders, jewellers, tailors, and hawkers all joined the industrial workers for a demonstration. From there, they went marching on foot through all the main roads of Nelamangala, past the police station, and back to the Kacheri, where they held a public meeting.
Non-unionized Workers on Strike
The mobilization of non-unionized workers in industrial areas through pickets, rallies, and marches is crucial for a successful strike in the context of globalization, which has disarticulated large factories, scattering workers on the production line of a product around the world, undermining their capacity to unionize.
Such street actions were prohibited by the police in the Bommasandra Industrial Area in the city’s southeast, where industry owners organized pressure on authorities, said CITU’s Karnataka State vice president, B. N. Manjunath.
However, the unionized workforce (about 30% of the workers here) downed tools and gathered for a 1000-people strong demonstration outside the industrial area at the main roundabout, before rallying about 5 km on National Highway-44 for a public meeting in Chandapura.
In the neighboring Jigani and Attibele, where unionists were able to lead rallies into the industrial areas and mobilize the non-unionized workforce, about 75% of production was halted for the day, following confrontations at many factory gates. About 2,000 workers from Jigani then gathered at the APC circle, blocking a critical node, linking this industrial area to the Bommasandra–Attibele corridor.
Outside Bangalore’s city limits in the rural district to its east, Hoskote was almost entirely shut down. The town is a bottleneck connecting the city to the industrial belt on the highway to Kolar. The Narasapura industrial area is among the most prominent in this belt. A large section of its workers reside in Hoskote town.
Strategic Pickets
“Other workers heading to Narasapura from Bangalore city must also enter Hoskote before connecting to the national highway en route. At this chokepoint, we set up a picket at four in the morning,” said Ananda Kumar, CITU’s working president for the Hoskote sub-district.
“We intercepted many company buses, including those ferrying workers to the iPhone manufacturing plant,” acquired from the Taiwanese company Wistron by the Indian manufacturing giant Tata in late 2023. The company bus of Japanese automotive company Honda was also stopped en route to its plant in Narasapura.
“We appealed to the workers in these buses to join their fellow workers in the strike. All permanent employees got off in solidarity. But contractual workers were too afraid of losing their jobs. So, some large companies like Tata and Honda were able to partially operate on the labour of contractual workers. But overall, at least 80% of the factories in this industrial belt were shut.”
Most of them had already announced closure for the day after being served the strike notice. Among them was the bus manufacturing plant of the Swedish multinational, Volvo, where Kumar is employed as the final inspector on the production line. He also heads its workers’ union. “We manufacture three buses a day. Closing for one day means a five crore loss for the company,” he calculated.
Most shops and commercial enterprises in Hoskote town were also shut in solidarity. Later that morning, employees of the local Gram Panchayat (village council), Dalit rights activists, and members of women’s rights.
Hoskote town shut down as it’s workers and residents march on a torchlight rally. Photo: CITU”We started from the Taluk Kacheri, marched through all the main roads of the town, before returning to the Kacheri for a public meeting,” following which they delivered a memorandum to Hoskote’s Assistant Commissioner, Ananda said.
Karnataka’s Largest Amusement Blockaded
To the south of Bangalore city, in the industrial area of Harohalli, and the connected Bidadi industrial area in the Ramanagara district, the strike was almost 100%, said the district’s JCTU coordinator and CITU’s Karnataka state secretary, Raghavendra.
Amid a show of force by union mobilizations ahead of the strike, factories, including the Japanese Toyota’s mother plant in India, had agreed not to operate on the day of the general strike upon receiving JCTU’s notice.
Striking workers from the two industrial areas assembled in Bidadi outside Karnataka’s largest amusement park, Wonderla, on the highway from Bangalore to the historic city of Mysore. Wonderla, which is also India’s largest chain of amusement parks, has “transferred its workers who unionized in Bidadi to different states. Under the cover of transfers, they have even dismissed many. Its management has also fronted a fake union, with which it has orchestrated negotiations to undermine us. So today was the day to confront them,” he added.
In defiance of the strike notice, Wonderla had opened the amusement park on the day. However, none could go in. About 3,000 striking workers from Bidadi and Harohalli occupied the road outside its entrance in a protest demonstration, forcing it to “close down for half a day”.
Blockade outside the largest amusement park. Photo: CITUFrom there, on about 1,500 motorcycles, we went on a rally of about 6 km to a ground in Bidadi for a public meeting.” On the way, farmers resisting the government’s forced land acquisition in the Byramangala village also joined the workers in the rally.
Industrial Actions Also Reported From Smaller Towns
Further along the highway, workers also withheld labour in several industrial units in the city of Mysore. Strikes were also reported from other cities and towns of Karnataka, including Tumkur, Belagavi, Kalaburagi, and Raichur, where over a thousand workers of the state-owned Hutti Gold Mines blockaded the road.
Unions under CITU alone stopped production in 159 factories, most of them in and around Bangalore, said its state president, Meenakshi Sundaram. The JCTU includes ten unions, with other left formations like the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) and All India Central Council of Trade Unions (AICCTU) also leading several actions.
Automotive and auto parts manufacturing, the engineering industry, electronics, and pharmaceuticals were the sectors most affected by the strike, added Sundaram. Banking was also partially disrupted, with the participation of its unions in the strike. Mid-day meal scheme workers also took part.
Manufacturing Workers on the Forefront
But manufacturing workers, he explained, were the core of the general strike in Karnataka, downing tools in the largest numbers, because they are the most immediately affected by the Labour Codes, whose withdrawal is among the central demands of the unions.
Around 87% of the registered factories in Karnataka employ less than 300 workers, the threshold below which the Labour Codes allow employers to retrench workers without needing government approval. The previous cut-off was at 100 workers.
It wasn’t that the Karnataka State governments had been automatically inclined to deny approval for retrenchments by employers hiring over 100. But the requirement of government approval opened the doors for unions to contest it, both in labour courts and in the public arena, where they could bring political consequences to bear, both on the ruling and the opposition parties.
By raising this threshold to 300 workers, the vast majority of Karnataka’s working class will be denied the possibility of contesting their retrenchments in this field.
Labour Laws Diluted
This is not the only threat posed to the working class by these four Labour Codes that have swallowed down 29 labour laws, diluting the protections they accorded. “They even altered the definition of working hours to exclude scheduled rest hours like lunch breaks,” said Sundaram. This automatically increases the working hours in a country that already ranks among the longest in the world.
Reducing the obligations on the employers to ensure workplace safety, the new codes provide them more wiggle room to get away without compensating in case of a workplace accident by pinning the blame on the injured worker’s own negligence.
The definition of “worker” itself is muddled by these codes, Sundaram added further. Anyone with the slightest supervisory power at work, earning a monthly wage of over Rs 18,000 – which is well below a living wage – “is not considered a ‘worker’ in these codes.” This effectively takes away their access to many industrial dispute mechanisms.
“They have instead been categorized as ‘employees’. But the definition of ’employee’ is left broad and ambiguous,” making it easier for the employers to evade legal liabilities and further contractualize work of a permanent nature.
Easing Business by Bending Labour Rights
While thus promoting the “ease of doing business” by offering “labour flexibility” to the employers, the codes simultaneously constrict trade union functioning. It further limits the number of union office bearers coming from the ranks of professional cadre, who are not necessarily employed in the particular factory or sector, but are skilled and experienced in strategizing and leading negotiations.
While deregulating work conditions, the codes regulate how a union can raise money and impose restrictions on how the funds can be spent. Simply securing recognition for a union is itself enormously more challenging under the new labour codes.
These codes had been rammed through the parliament over five years ago in September 2020 by the far-right BJP ruling in the center. Opposition parties, including the largest of them, the Indian National Congress (INC), had condemned the move as “anti-worker”.
Amid mass opposition by trade unions, which, in multiple general strikes since, mobilized hundreds of millions of workers, the central government did not notify the codes until November 2025, when they took effect.
“The government has snatched away all the rights that workers had in their hands. The protections previously granted to workers have been taken away, and new avenues for their exploitation have been opened,” senior INC MP Priyanka Gandhi said on the codes’ notification.
“Anti-Labour, Anti-Worker, Pro-Cronies”
INC president and leader of opposition in the parliament’s upper house, Mallikarjun Kharge, condemned the central government as “anti-labour, anti-worker, pro-cronies”. Along with former INC chiefs, Rahul Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi, Kharge joined the left MPs in the multi-party protest against the notification of these codes at an entrance to the parliament in the national capital, New Delhi, in December 2025.
A month later, however, in his home state of Karnataka, down south, where the INC is the ruling party, the state government published the draft for Industrial Relations (Karnataka) Rules, 2026, to implement the labour codes, ahead even of many BJP-ruled state governments.
“The Karnataka government,” Sundaram pointed out, “had an opportunity to protect the state’s working class,” from these labour codes which Kharge had eloquently described on the parliament floor as a cover for a multi-pronged attack on the working class by the BJP.
In the neighboring state of Kerala, ruled by the Left Democratic Front (LDF) led by the Communist Party of India – Marxist (CPIM) with which the CITU is affiliated, the state government has refused to implement the labour codes. It has instead called on the central government to withdraw them.
Even if the INC’s Karnataka government did not want to play hardball with the central government, it could, at the very least, “have made amendments to the central codes to ensure that the majority of Karnataka’s working class is not stripped of their labour rights,” insists Sundaram.
“Labour-industry relations fall in the concurrent list of the Constitution. This gives the state government the power to make such amendments to the codes notified by the central government. And they did use this power to amend, but not protect workers. They have instead used it to further intensify the central labour codes’ attack on trade unions.”
For example, the central labour codes, which raise the threshold of minimum membership required for a union’s recognition, nevertheless retain secret ballot voting by workers as the means of determining whether the union represents a sufficient workforce in a factory or sector. The draft rules published by the Karnataka state government have “worsened this by replacing secret ballots with verification by government officials.”
Two Faces of the Leading Opposition Party
In its defense, the state government maintains that the rules it has published are only a draft, and unions can provide input before they are finally legislated later this year. Nevertheless, Sundaram argues, “this draft exposes the intention of the state government.”
Opposing the Labour Codes as an anti-worker policy of the BJP at the center, where the INC wields no power, while pleasing the corporates with an even more aggressive version of it in a state where it rules, is a two-faced nature of the party it does not want exposed, he said.
This, he argued, is the reason the Karnataka state’s police refused permission for the central demonstration on the day of the general strike in front of Bangalore’s Town Hall, a city center under the gaze of the cameras of the large corporate media houses, which mostly ignored the actions in industrial areas.
Mass Detentions
The JCTU refused to budge. On the morning of the general strike, when workers were setting up pickets in the industrial areas, the state police were setting up pickets of their own in front of Town Hall.
Well before the striking workers were set to arrive at the location for a demonstration scheduled at 11 am, “the police were already there in thousands,” with barricades and parked buses for detentions, recalled Sundaram.
Waving red flags and carrying banners, the first rally arrived, sloganeering, with trade unionists and farmer leaders on the front, marching straight into the picket of the police, who started grabbing the protesters.
CITU Karnataka state secretary, Varalakshmi, locked arms with other women leaders and fell back on the road to hold ground and resist arrests. Prying them apart, scores of policewomen hauled them onto buses.
CITU Karnataka State secretary being forcefully arrested. Photo: CITUOlder men and women were also lifted off the ground from their wrists and feet, even as they complained of their damaged knees. Among the Khaki-clad police were also grotesquely large bouncer-like men in blue safari suits with no visible badges revealing their names, unnecessarily manhandling and shoving grey-haired veteran leaders like Sundaram, even as they were courting arrests.
Nevertheless, the protesters continued to arrive in droves, in rally after rally, including one by the Karnataka State IT/ITeS Employees Union (KITU). Relatively new in a largely non-unionized sector, their numbers are not yet large enough to close down IT companies for the strike.
Nonetheless, the union has won many legal battles against several corporate giants of the sector headquartered in the city, successfully reinstating hundreds of terminated employees. It mustered a roughly 200-people-strong rally of software engineers, data analysts, etc, on leave to join this protest.
KITU General Secretary, Suhas Adiga, being forcefully arrested. Photo: CITUMarching into the police lines with the chants of Inquilab Zindabab, they fiercely resisted arrests, raising slogans of “workers’ unity” against “greedy capitalists”, calling out Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the state’s Chief Minister Siddaramaiah as their agents, while being roughened up and hurled into buses. The youngest detained in this roundup was Nilda Kranti, a six-month-old infant, clutching onto her young mother, who followed her protesting husband into detention.
6 months old infant detained. Photo: CITUAround this time, Kharge was declaring solidarity with the general strike, with the statement: “From the streets to Parliament, our struggle will continue.”
“Today, millions of workers and farmers across the country are on the streets, raising their voice for their rights,” Rahul Gandhi, leader of the opposition in the parliament’s lower house and former chief of the INC, said in a social media post. “I stand firmly … with their struggle.”
But, down south from the national capital in the state of Karnataka, where his party rules, the police were running out of buses to detain protesters who continued to arrive in rallies at the square in front of the Town Hall. Ordering passengers out of the buses they stopped in traffic, the police diverted more public transport to the Town Hall to continue detaining protesters.
“If the workers and farmers cross the boundary of peaceful protests…”
Most of the detainees, including all the union leaders, were driven to the Police Grounds in Adugodi, where they continued protests under police custody.
“In our long history of protests, we have never turned to violence, never set fire to buses,” Varalakshmi said in her address to this protest. Nevertheless, “the police denied us permission to even make one public announcement of the strike from a speaker on a moving auto-rickshaw.”
This, she went on to argue, shows that the state does not simply insist that the agitations remain peaceful and in compliance with the law and order, but goes on to demand capitulation from “the labouring classes, accepting that they are slaves, with no right to protest.”
“But, we warn you, if we workers and farmers are forced to cross the boundary of peaceful protests, your bullets and batons and prisons will fall short,” she declared, addressing the police, drawing cheers from detained protesters appreciating the arithmetic.
Courtesy: Peoples Dispatch
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